Teaching strokes to various tennis folks

At the peak of Gretchen Magers' career, she reached the quarterfinals of three Grand Slam tournaments. (John R. McCutchen / Union-Tribune)

At the peak of Gretchen Magers' career, she reached the quarterfinals of three Grand Slam tournaments. (John R. McCutchen / Union-Tribune)

Don Norcross

Gretchen Magers curtsied to royalty on Wimbledon grass and kicked up clay at Stade Roland Garros. Once the world's 22nd-ranked women's tennis player, Magers is 45 now, but her passion for a racket, strings and a fuzzy yellow ball has not waned.

“(Tennis) is a big part of my life, mostly because I don't like to do housework,” joked Magers, who lives in Point Loma. “Staying home is not my cup of tea.”

Currently, she's in Mallorca, Spain, playing in a Davis Cup-style tournament for players 35-55.

Befitting a person of Magers' professional background, she has instructed at opulent settings, including the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club and the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club.

Magers, though, is far more comfortable teaching common folk, people with dents in their rackets and smudges on their shirts.

She recently concluded her first season as San Diego City College's women's coach. The Knights finished 1-11. She teaches at the Peninsula Tennis Club in Ocean Beach, where soccer players, skateboarders and joggers roam nearby.

She champions beach tennis, which is played, as you may surmise, on sand, utilizing only volleys.

“At the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, people were trying to fit me between Pilates and their massage,” Magers said. “That's not to say I wasn't relevant, but I'd rather spend time with people – and I know this sounds like a cliché – but with people I can make a difference.”

At City College, three of Magers' athletes had never played competitive tennis. She rounded up one from the soccer team, one from volleyball and another from a P.E. class. One player was in her 30s.

This, for a woman who once coached Amber Liu, the former La Mesa resident who won two NCAA titles at Stanford.

A City College player phoned Magers one day and explained she'd be late for practice.

“Somebody got shot outside my work and he was bleeding,” the player said.

Recalled Magers, “I'm like, 'Where do you work? I'm not going to go there.'But that's their lives. That's part of the world we don't see.”

Another of Magers' players, a fiery Russian, was having difficulty, as the coach puts it, “holding on to her racket.”

Translation: The racket was absorbing some abuse.

Magers negotiated a deal with the woman. If she could play the rest of the season without the racket leaving her hand, she could keep the racket, which was on loan.

The woman succeeded and the racket is now hers to hold or hoist.

Magers owes her compassion for the commoner to her upbringing. The middle of five siblings, she was raised outside Pittsburgh. Her father was a dentist. Her mother raised the brood.

One day, Magers' father brought home a collection of rackets passed along by a client. Magers, then 11, took to the game almost immediately because it was one sport in which she could compete with her older brother, Brad.

Brad, it seems, enjoyed goading Gretchen in the family games they would play.

At the zenith of her tennis career, Magers advanced to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, losing to Martina Navratilova, and to the quarters at the French and U.S. Opens, losing to Andea Jaeger both times.

Her style was and still is one seldom witnessed on the women's professional tour today: an all-court game, one of angles and deft touch at the net.

“I just don't have the patience to stay at the baseline,” she said.

Magers is married with three children, a 14-year-old son, Matthew, and twin 12-year-old girls, Katie and Marin. None of the children plays tennis, which doesn't bother Magers. There's none of that child-following-mother's-footsteps pressure. No need to differentiate mother from coach.

When Gretchen asked if the girls wanted to take golf lessons, Katie replied, “Mom, golf is the second-most boring sport, besides tennis.”

Magers' love of the game, though, is palpable.

Practicing at the Barnes Tennis Center on clay the day before leaving for Spain, Magers excitedly talked about her new shoes and racket strings. She sounded 45 going on 14.

When she hit a forehand drop shot for a winner, self-effacingly, she said, “That's how old people play.”

Asked what she likes about the game, she sounded like the long-distance runner, saying, “It's meditative. It's probably the only time in my life it's quiet. Nobody wants something from me. It's a little sanctuary.”

Ed Collins teaches alongside Magers at the Peninsula Tennis Club. When one of Collins' students hits an impressive shot, it's not unusual for Magers to compliment the person from the next court where Magers is giving lessons.

“She's just a real, genuinely sincere, people person,” Collins said.

Late in the season at City College, the Knights hit the road to play perennial power Grossmont. Knowing what the outcome would be, Magers sought to teach a lesson more important than backhand volleys: that it was a gift to play the game against such talented athletes.

She began telling her players about Billie Jean King and how King took on Bobby Riggs, defeating Riggs in their famous Battle of the Sexes.

There was one issue. Many of the women had never heard of King.

Magers, though, came prepared, carrying a copy of King's book “Pressure is a Privilege.”

On the way home from the defeat, one of Magers' players read the book's introduction aloud to the team.

“You're not losing your house today,” Magers told her players after the match. “You're not losing your job. When hard times do come, you'll be a stronger person.”